Feminists are stealing our sexbots, Men’s Rights Redditors warn

Reddit MRAs are all in a tizzy about the evil feminist plot to deprive them of sexbots that don’t yet exist.

Playing the part of “the feminists” in this scenario: two European robot ethicists — that is, two human beings who study the ethical issues raised by robotics — who have launched what they call a Campaign Against Sex Robots. Their concern? That sex robots will “contribute to inequalities in society” and “further objectif[y] women and children.”

extending relations of prostitution into machines is neither ethical, nor is it safe. If anything the development of sex robots will further reinforce relations of power that do not recognise both parties as human subjects.

It’s not clear that there is anything to the campaign beyond this position paper, a bare-bones website, a crappy logo, and its two organizers, but the fellas on the Men’s Rights subreddit are treating this like some kind of sexbot Pearl Harbor.

Naturally the discussion was full of the thoughtful analysis and good sense that we have come to expect from the Men’s Rights Movement.

Yes, that’s right. The guy who reacted to a news article about a two-person campaign to ban hypothetical future sex robots by pounding out a slur-ridden polemic talking about how much he’d like to punch “these mentally bipolar cunts … hard in the face” is complaining that other people are too easily offended.

Tilting_Gambit, meanwhile, explained the pussyconomics behind it all.

And since most women don’t have anything to offer men beyond sex — at least in the eyes of quite a few Men’s Rights Redditors — a plunge in the price of sex will render many of the utterly worthless.

There was much agreement on this point.

Much much agreement:

A couple of Redditors broke down the math:

ExpendableOne suggested that we wouldn’t even need to destroy women with sexbots if non-robot women were just nicer to nice guys like (presumably) him.

Toysjoe wonders what the feminists will try to ban next.

ATTENTION FEMINISTS! CODE RED!

THEY KNOW!

(Non-feminists, just ignore that last bit. Nothing to see here, nothing at all.)

HoundDog, meanwhile, has concluded that sexbots are pretty much unbannable, and is quite looking forward to the newly chastened women he thinks the sexbot revolution will create.

Somehow I don’t think that the disappearance of these guys from the dating marketplace is going to make many non-robot women all that sad.

See the rest of the thread for much more of the same, including gratuitous references to Anita Sarkeesian, attacks on non-STEM academic fields, and one dude who seems to have a sexual fetish for C-3PO.

H/T — A bunch of people sent me this one. Thanks!

EDIT: Added a link to the Reddit thread which I somehow had neglected to put in here.

You know, Campaign Against Sex Robots, I think one excellent way to help assure that sex robots don’t add to real women’s objectification would be to NOT call it “prostitution” if someone pays to have sex with one. The word you’re looking for there is “rental.”

I’d like to think that sex robots could actually contribute to women’s re-subjectification. I mean, wouldn’t it be nice to live in a world where the only sex objects really are literal sex objects? And not, you know, people?

I also think both Manospherians and CASR would be shocked to discover just how much of a market there would be for sophisticated sex robot rentals for women. I mean, if it has a pretty shape, a nice voice and vibrating bits in the right places, all you need to offer women is a reasonable price and a discreet and clean opportunity, and you’d definitely have takers.

@Belle D
“I wonder, is any country trying the approach of decriminalizing individual sex work but criminalizing the fuck out of pimping? Maybe to the point of being super stringent about anything looking like a brothel?”

Yes, we have this in Latvia. To the point that there is an officially acknowledged street in Riga (the capital city) where prostitutes can hang around while waiting for clients. Brothels, on the other hand, are categorized as a form of sutenerism. However, the mechanisms for ensuring this law are often failing, as there is little ways to check if the prostitute’s income isn’t actually controlled by a pimp. Meanwhile, the brothels usually label themselves “massage salons”, and there is little the police can do, because erotic massage is not forbidden, and the line between e.m. and sex is not regulated.

If the sexbots serve as sex objects, then that frees up women to be free to be all the other things they could be without the patriarchy constantly oppressing them, it’s a win situation for females surely.

Oh, surely it is a win for females. MRAs will totes be happy with their new toyz and leave us alone. No longer will they decry our sexual inhibitions/sluttiness, gold-digging/careerism, uptight demand that men wipe their asses/filthy slovenliness, etc.

Indeed, the menz will be always satisfied & we females will live our lives free of insults, catcalls, manipulation, dirty tricks, assaults, kidnapping, rape, and murder.

I wonder, is any country trying the approach of decriminalizing individual sex work but criminalizing the fuck out of pimping? Maybe to the point of being super stringent about anything looking like a brothel?

I thought this approach was fairly common in western countries. For example in Finland you can’t legally sell advertisement space for sex workers, or security or any other support services. Apparently you can’t knowingly rent a flat to someone who does sex work from home.

We haven’t technically criminalized clients, but recently the clients are required to ensure (beyond reasonable doubt) that the sex worker isn’t a “victim of human trafficking or procuring”. Procuring technically includes what I described above. It remains to be seen whether this is remotely enforceable.

Most major sex work organizations push for the decriminalization of all sex work related activities, including brothels. Which makes sense to me?I’m not aware of any other industry where we tell workers me “sure, you can keep working, but I’m going to need you to do it outside and completely alone. You know, for your protection.” How is that helpful?

BTW, while sex trafficking and procuring are crimes and there’s plenty of victim rhetoric around sex work, Finnish justice system has been really slow to recognize even actual trafficked sex workers as victims of a crime, rather than witnesses to crime.

It’s not that long since everybody thought, “we don’t need a law against human trafficking because that only occurs in sex trade and is already covered by our anti-procuring laws”. There was some international pressure, and a law was introduced. Then we suddenly noticed that a) trafficking is also common in construction and restaurant business and b) trafficked sex workers might actually need victim protections, maybe.

New Zealand has decriminalised sex work and extended legal protections to sex workers on the same basis as they do to any other workers. A woman recently sued the brothel owner where she worked for for sexual harassment *and won*. A worldwide first, I believe.

People trying to use Japanese women as some kind of ideal of femininity that Western women have abandoned are somewhat funny to me, somebody who is somewhat familiar with Japanese culture.

Yes, the Japanese porn and sex industry are pretty prevalent. But not only is Japanese culture somewhat more conservative in nature than most, but there’s still a strong anti-foreigner bias in certain places, including their red-light districts. Word is that most red-light shops in Japan don’t admit foreigners.

Also, one thing that I occasionally hear about is that Japanese people refer to foreign men who come over to try and get a Japanese woman as “Japasen”, and it’s not supposed to be a compliment.

It’s funny to me that these men think any woman would be interested in a guy who would prefer to fuck an anthropomorphic fleshlight over a live human being. As if that’s anything but creepy and pathetic.

There is an ancient urban legend, once even told as fact by an eminent medical examination, about the man found dead with a tetanic grin on his face in the embrace of a vacuum cleaner, which was still on.

Well I mean if someone invented sexbots they would be band if they were ever made with enough intelligence to not want to be sexbots. But besides that they would just be sex dolls right? Which are already legal :p

There’s an evolutionary aspect here, right? One cannot, through a sexbot, propagate one’s genes. The MRAs could literally fuck themselves out of existence.

Remember the Maiden Aunt hypothesis: One can reproduce one’s genes not only by reproducing oneself but also by helping one’s relatives to reproduce. As a result, a society with a certain proportion of childless adults might be more effective, and therefore spread its genes more widely, than one where everyone is pumping out as many kids as possible.

I read a paper once which theorised that this is a possible genetic reason for homosexuality, and a reason why it comes up more often in younger siblings. It’s not a falsifiable hypothesis, of course, but it’s a cool idea.

I know one reason why homosexuality is an evolutionary advantages is while the breeders are out breeding and caring for their own young, a same-sex couple can adopt offspring that has been abandoned or parent’s have died, meaning the offspring can survive and spread its genes to the next generation.

This sounds kind of like those forced 4-chan false flag things they do from time to time, like the “free bleeding” thing. And didn’t they do something about banning mothers’ day or something? Just something designed to sound ridiculous to create grist for the MRA outrage mill… I have a really hard time believing that anyone seriously, unironically has decided to campaign about sex robots that don’t even exist.

It is amazing to me that these guys spout the C word dozens of times in one hateful screed and still expect to be taken seriously. It amazes me more that they still expect to be taken seriously after making such a fuss over something completely hypothetical, something that is imagined- the possibility of sexbots. Not only are they making a fuss about something that is imagined, they are behaving like it is the end of the world that someone has misgivings about sexbots and their welfare. Not only are these guys hateful bigots, they have no grasp on reality.

Seems to me that sexbots will provide a vital public service by limiting MRAs’ access to real women, thereby keeping them off the streets.

A couple things, first of all, I really don’t like the whole “access to women” thing. the Manosphere guys use that a lot, and it always makes women’s bodies seem like “territory” they have a right to invade. But anyway, as for the rest, just how long do you think the men are going to spend with their sex bots? They’ll presumably go to work, or the store, or many places outside of their homes. And assuming women won’t all be at home with their own sexbots, they will have to interact with real live women. Can you be sure that these types of guys, when they have a perfectly obedient and malleable fake woman at home, will not want or maybe expect real women to be the same? This is part of the issue in this whole hypothetical argument. Seriously, look at how modern mainstream porn has affected how these kinds of guys view women and how they should behave.

The Japanese and Korean governments seem to believe it’s the Scandinavians and French who have the reproductive culture working in their societies. Japan may cater to men’s fantasies but the result is a plummeting fertility rate. Women go their own way and keep their careers.

“Since the early 2000s France has consistently topped European rankings (in birth rates). After two decades of decline, in the 1970s-80s, the fertility rate started picking up again in the late 1990s. Since then the country has registered scores just short of the mythical threshold of 2.1 children per woman, which would secure a steady population.”
Yet there is nothing mysterious about the approach that is working in both France and Scandinavia. It combines the idea of a modern family based on gender equality and powerful government policies. “Nowadays, both ingredients are needed to sustain the population.”

“A woman entering into a relationship (in Japan) must also accept marriage, obey her husband, have a child, stop working after it is born and make room for her ageing in-laws. It’s a case of all or nothing.” “In Japan the traditional family package clearly has a dramatic impact on fertility, with fewer than 1.4 births per woman.”

In France the package is more flexible: one doesn’t have to get married or have children or stop working following childbirth. Norms are more open and families more diverse.””The principle of gender equality and the necessary corollary of women being free to work are the key factors in this family model that emerged at the end of the 20th century. Yet in the 1960s-70s advocates of traditional family values claimed that the birthrate would be the first thing to suffer from this trend. Fifty years on it seems they were mistaken: fertility in Europe is higher in countries where women go out to work, lower in those where they generally stay at home. “Women’s freedom of decision is essential to this system,”

I don’t have an issue with these “sex robots” as it keeps these creepster dudes away from flesh and blood women. I also have no issue with prostitution (as long as it’s 100% consensual) or porn. The issue I have with prostitution is that where I live (Thailand), is that it’s not consensual and is borne of institutionalized sexism and classism. Some guys (not the majority, thankfully!) come to Thailand to capitalize on the poverty here and brag that they can “buy any Thai woman they want”. If sex robots will keep them home, happy and not exploiting desperate women who are forced into prostitution, that’s fantastic.

Sexbots are only a threat to women if all women had to offer was sex. Since this is not true, who cares about sexbots? MRAs have really built up this fantasy that women will be weeping on the roadsides if sexbots become popular. They forget that women can buy sexbots too.

One of the things that keeps popping up and starts to irk me more and more is how they (well, not just the mras) always talk about Prostitution as if there is no actual human being involved in sexwork. Prostitution takes away the sex Monopoly from women? Only if prostitutes aren’t women. They make them even more into objects than the rest of us. Obviously that’s a thing mras and puas and redpillers would do, because they are the ultimate shitweasels, and resent that at least some women have the option to NOT be objects, but i’ve seen it elsewhere too, liberals going on about how prostitution will reduce the rate of rapes occuring, because… mysterious reasons, but when you think it through, what it boils down to, is saying that sexworkers can’t be violated, because they are prostitutes and don’t count like ‘normal’ women. That they will do and have to put up with anything and anyone for money. They are the sacrifice to male entitlement and violence so the rest of us can be safe. It’s so wrong and skeevy and needs to stop.

That said, i look forward to the fit the redpillers will throw when they’ve spent thousands of dollars on their robots and try to rub it into our faces, just to realise that at best no one cares and at worst people will laugh at them and then go on to lead happy lifes (with lots of kitties) .

Women have had sexbots since victorian times. And let’s be honest, ladies — they are the best. Every time I use mine I become convinced that every technological advance leading up to the invention of the illustrious vibrator has now come to its natural completion, and human advancement might as well just stop right there. Because vibrators. Vibrators you guys.

And yet, though we have literally the best sex toy ever conceived sitting conveniently in our bedside tables, and have done since 1869, the human race has persevered. We have continued to have emotionally fulfilling relationships. We have continued to have children when we chose, and enjoyed their company. We have continued to write and dream and eat spaghetti and go to the park and have whole lives like whole humans because THE WORLD DOES NOT BEGIN AND END WITH YOUR BONERS, MRAs.

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